In today's technological environment, people often communicate with each other via electronic mail (“email”) using portable computing and communication devices, laptop computers, desktop computers and other communication devices. Communication via email has become so commonplace that a single individual may have several email addresses. Businesses and generally commercial organizations, non-profit organizations and virtually every other type of organization use emails as a way to promote their products and/or services, and to inform the public or a selected subset of the public of their products, services or organizational goals. As a result, individuals are inundated with emails on a daily basis. Most of the received emails, or at least a substantial portion of the received emails, are advertisements targeting a particular demographic where such emails are, in essence, ads promoting sales of particular products/services for a specific time period after which the product/service may no longer be available or the promotion may no longer be valid.
Users of email typically have email software that is installed on a computer or a mobile telephone that allows the users to compose emails in accordance with well-known and accepted email communication standards and protocols. Such email software has at least an Inbox in which received emails are stored and are accessible for viewing by the user. For many users, the number of emails received during a typical business day may be in the dozens. At some point a user has to review the contents of the Inbox to remove large numbers of dated, unwanted and irrelevant emails from the user's cluttered Inbox. Also, there are instances in which a sender of an email may desire that the email, once received by the intended recipient, be deleted within a particular period of time. Such emails may contain sensitive privileged and/or confidential information and that it may be desirable to the senders of these emails to limit the length of time such emails reside in a receiving server or within the Inbox of the intended recipient. Further, commercial organizations that perform mass transmissions of emails are probably aware that there may be several of their previous emails in a recipient's Inbox and that at some point all of these emails will be deleted by the recipient without even checking for the latest of such emails that may still be relevant. It would be desirable for such mass emailers to have their dated emails deleted at some point so that consumers can focus on the more recent emails proffering the latest sales/promotional ads.